Per AppleInsider, Microsoft on Wednesday launched its latest effort to reverse the fortunes of its Windows platform, showing off a line of new devices and unveiling Windows 8.1, a new build designed to boost interest in the company’s underperforming Windows 8.

At its Build developer conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Microsoft looked to woo developers and win over customers who have been reluctant to upgrade to its newest operating system. As the company confirmed in the past, Windows 8.1 will feature the return of the Start Menu, as well as the option to bypass the touch-centric Modern UI and boot directly to the desktop.

Aside from the return of the Start Menu and the boot-to-desktop option, Microsoft showed off a number of tweaks and additions to its operating system.

Microsoft also showed off increased Bing integration, saying that the search engine has consistently grown market share in the United States since its introduction. Bing powers the full search experience throughout Windows 8.1, with features built in to show not only links to content, but also different ways to interact with that content.

If you’ve tried the Windows 8.1 update is due out for general release later this year.

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VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization project available for free has just hit version 4.2.14. The new version, a 150 megabyte download, features the following fixes and changes:
- VMM: another TLB invalidation fix for non-present pages.

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You’ve been hankering for a native version of Microsoft Office for iOS for some time now.

And it’s arrived.

Per AppleInsider, Microsoft on Friday released its Office Mobile 365 app for Apple’s iPhone, allowing users with subscriptions to the productivity suite to access Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the go.

With Microsoft’s Office Mobile, users can view documents stored in Microsoft’s SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro or SharePoint, as well as read and edit Office docs sent as email attachments. Additionally, owners of Windows machines can remotely access documents that were recently viewed on a desktop client.

Another PC-only feature is “Resume Reading,” which allows Word documents opened from SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro to automatically jump to where users left off on their Windows computer or tablet.

Microsoft says documents are optimized before being viewed on the iPhone, while support for charts, animations, SmartArt Graphics and shapes comes built-in. Also available is an in-app Slide Navigator in PowerPoint and a function to help with presentation practice.

The application offers the following features:
- Edit – You can make quick edits to Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

- Edit While Offline – Your device doesn’t have to be continuously connected to the network to work on an Office document that is stored online. You can view and edit recently used documents even while you’re offline. Your changes will be saved online when your device reconnects to the network or to Wi-Fi.

- Create – You can create new Word and Excel documents on your phone.

- Comments – You can review comments that have been made in Word and Excel documents on your phone and add your own comments.

- Share – When you’re done with your edits or comments, simply send the document in email or save it to SkyDrive or SharePoint.

Office Mobile comes in at 58MB and is available from the App Store as a free companion app for existing Office 365 subscribers. The app requires an iOS device running iOS 6.1 or later to install and run. Microsoft Office 2013 for PC is required for recent document and resume reading.

If you’ve tried Office Mobile 365 and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.

If you’re using Windows 8 on your Mac, there’s some changes coming down the pipe.

Per The Verge, Microsoft demonstrated a number of new features in Windows 8.1 earlier this week, but the company briefly showed the return of the Start button as well.

During Computex this week the company took the time to fully demo the Start button. In the following video you can see how Microsoft is adding options to show the All Apps view when the Start button is activated. The animation of the Start button switching between the desktop and Start Screen is clearly shown too with the new support for desktop wallpapers on the Start Screen. Microsoft will deliver a preview version of Windows 8.1 on June 26th:

Per iMore, Opera, is offering people a chance to download its latest desktop browser (version 15) for Windows and Mac, which typically happens ahead of a general release.

Dubbed “Opera Next” as per usual, this time the browser was “made from scratch” and given a revamp to offer users a sleeker and easier browsing experience, the company says in a statement.

Opera’s Speed Dial start page has been redesigned, as shortcuts to Web pages can be organized in folders and filtered, while the address bar now also serves as a starting point for search queries.

Perhaps more importantly, the desktop browser has been equipped with a new feature recently seen in Opera’s all-new Android browser: a curated content recommendation system called, simply, ‘Discover’.

This feature digs up content that’s supposed to be relevant for users based on their location and a number of pre-set categories such as food, technology and news.

Also new is the ‘Stash’ feature, which essentially lets people ‘pin’ items or entire websites for easy reference when shopping, doing homework or any other kind of research.

More than a fresh lick of paint and a handful of new (some overdue) features, Opera says the latest generation of its desktop browser has been “completely re-engineered under the hood”, with the most notable change being that it now runs on Chromium – as expected.

This gives users a standards-compliant and high-performance browser, Opera argues. The browser’s ‘Off-Road’ mode, previously called Opera Turbo, also now supports the open SPDY protocol and thus enables loading Web pages faster than ever.

The company has notably decoupled its internal e-mail client from the new desktop browser (“on popular demand”), and has pushed the ‘first release candidate’ of Opera Mail for Windows and Mac – snapshots can be found here at the bottom.

Opera’s browser has the smallest market share of the top five desktop browser, but the company has well over 300 million people using its range of mobile and desktop Web browser applications overall.

If you’ve tried the new browser and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.

Per Mac|Life and CNN Money, Microsoft has apparently been pushing Apple for a Windows 8-native edition of iTunes, which currently only runs in traditional Desktop mode on the company’s Metro-style software — and not at all on the tablet-centric Windows RT.

“You shouldn’t expect an iTunes app on Windows 8 any time soon,” laments Windows Division CFO Tami Reller. “ITunes is in high demand. The welcome mat has been laid out. It’s not for lack of trying.”

While Apple has grudgingly carried over iTunes, Safari, QuickTime and even iCloud to the Windows platform, the company has largely ignored Windows 8, which debuted six months ago and claims to have sold 10 million licenses during that time.

Windows RT owners are the ones suffering most from Apple’s neglect — they can’t install iTunes at all since it requires Intel hardware, which means a traditional desktop or laptop computer or more expensive Windows Pro tablet.

However, even that is a less than ideal experience, since iTunes doesn’t currently take advantage of the native Windows 8 experience, instead running as a window inside the classic Desktop view.

While the words “bargaining chip” come to mind, we’ll have to wait and see if an accord can be reached between Apple and Microsoft as to what to do with iTunes when it comes to the Windows 8 universe…

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On Thursday, Dropbox released version 2.0.10 of its cloud-based storage client for Mac OS X. The new version, a 29.1 megabyte download (via MacUpdate), which adds the following fixes and changes:
- Fix installation error on Windows.

- Fixed some issues in High DPI mode on Windows.

- Fixed icon overlays not updating on OS X 10.4 Tiger.

- Fixed inability to open Tray menu in Linux when disconnected.

- Fixed the tray popup positioning on Windows when an RTL language is used.

Dropbox 2.0.10 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new beta and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.